<?php
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$xhtml = array(
	'<{title}>' => 'I was so close to finishing ...',
	'takedown' => '2017-11-01',
	'<{body}>' => <<<END
<img src="/img/CC_BY-SA_4.0/y.st./weblog/2018/10/25.jpg" alt="A fork in the path" class="framed-centred-image" width="649" height="480"/>
<section id="drudgery">
	<h2>Drudgery</h2>
	<p>
		My discussion post for the day:
	</p>
	<blockquote>
		<p>
			There have been a number of cases in which I&apos;ve had a condition and been presented with a medical solution that would impact my quality of life.
			First, several times in childhood, my airway closed up on me and I couldn&apos;t breathe.
			If I recall, the treatment every time was a gas administered at the hospital.
			Without it, my quality of life would be at zero.
			I should be dead right now.
		</p>
		<p>
			Later in life, but still as a child, I ended up with an eye condition called iritis.
			My eyes swelled up, any amount of light whatsoever was incredibly painful to me, and my vision was blurred significantly.
			At the time, I had crippling depression, completely unrelated to the iritis.
			The only thing I had to live for was my art though, and if I lost my vision, I was sure I was going to finally succees in suicide.
			I&apos;d tried several times in the past, but always chickened out.
			With my art being the only thing I enjoyed though and having that taken away from me, I thought I&apos;d make sure I went through with it this time to put an end to my suffering.
			The doctors never did figure out the cause of my problem.
			Iritis is a symptom, not a disease.
			They prescribed me a bunch of steroid eye drops though.
			These combatted they symptom and ostensibly the problem, as it eventually went away.
			Damage had already been done to my eyes by this point, and my vision has never been the same since.
			One of my eyelids is also now damaged, and doesn&apos;t open as far as the other.
			Still, my quality of life has been vastly improved by this.
			I was able to continue my art, which got me through a good chunk of my depressed childhood, and I lived long enough to escape my toxic home environment and move out on my own, where I no longer suffer from depression.
			And to top it off, I can still see.
			My vision&apos;s blurry when it comes to distant objects, but I can see across a room well enough, as long as I&apos;m not trying to read something on the other side.
			Using measures of functioning (Ogden, 2017), we can see I function much better still having most of my vision than I would without any of it.
		</p>
		<p>
			I think that last incident is the most impactful, but I&apos;ve also had oral surgeries to extract teeth that were rotting.
			I inherited bad teeth from my parents,especially my mother.
			I&apos;m going to have no teeth in my old age; it&apos;s an inevitability.
			The rotten teeth turned out to be messing with my emotions though, so getting them removed lifted my spirits considerably.
			Additionally, it turned out the tooth infections were spreading to my ears, so all the odd ear infections I&apos;d been having went away as well.
			As far as measures of functioning are concerned, I perform a variety of daily tasks better without the downward moods the infections had apparently been causing me.
		</p>
		<p>
			Finally though, the discussion assignment asks about the <strong>*most recent*</strong> time a medical treatment was presented.
			Most recently, I had a fragment of glass embedded in my foot.
			Or so I thought.
			The medical treatment was obviously minor foot surgery to get the thing out.
			This was the type of surgery that was <strong>*so*</strong> minor that no anaesthesia was recommended or even offered, and there was no pain at all, aside from something minor that I&apos;m not even sure I didn&apos;t just imagine.
			The doctor just cut into my dead foot skin and tried to find the glass.
			Instead of glass though, they found a corn, and under the corn, was a small hair fragment.
			As best as we can tell, when the glass stabbed into my foot - which happened in several places, actually - it dragged a piece of hair from the floor into the wound.
			I actually got all the glass out myself successfully that day, but the hair went unnoticed and my skin reacted rather badly to it, developing that corn.
			With the minor surgery, I saw immediate results and it no longer feels like I&apos;m stepping on something sharp everywhere I go.
			This one probably impacted me the least.
			I can walk faster after the treatment, so my measures of functioning have improved a bit.
			However ... that&apos;s probably the most boring of my medical stories.
			That&apos;s why I included more than just this most recent story.
		</p>
		<p>
			I avoid things that treat only symptoms, such as painkillers.
			I do seek medical help when I think a doctor will have an answer though - an answer to the problem, not the symptoms.
			I can&apos;t really think of a time this hasn&apos;t impacted my quality of life in a positive way.
			It could be something minor, such as making it so I can walk without constant pain, or it could be something major, such as preventing my blindness, but doctors tend to have solutions, in my experience.
			That said, I still have to argue with them about symptom treatment sometimes.
			Some of them are pretty insistent that you take unnecessary pain meds that don&apos;t fix the underlying problem, but make you feel better in the mean time.
			I prefer to know the signals my body is trying to send my brain though.
			It helps me know what&apos;s going on, even if it can be unpleasant at times.
			Some people think removing pain, even without removing the cause of the pain, improves quality of life though.
			Simply put, some people consider pain level to be one of the measures of quality of life (Ogden, 2017).
			Personally, I think the pain is useful in measuring the state of the healing process.
		</p>
		<p>
			The discussion assignment tells us to cite both our reading materials for the week.
			However, the second resource is related to telehealth.
			Telehealth is the concept of remote monitoring of health conditions and symptoms (Rixon, Hirani, Cartwright, &amp; Newman, 2017).
			I&apos;ve never had any experience with this, and the discussion topic for the week is about our own experiences.
			My dentist insists on doing everything via telephone.
			I don&apos;t have telephone service, which means the dentist doesn&apos;t contact me remotely for any reason.
			My general care physician tried to get me to use their website to look up the results of a blood test once.
			I was busy with a hard school week though and figured I&apos;d wait until I had all my work in.
			It couldn&apos;t have been more than a week, but they got impatient on me and sent the results via post.
			I guess they log which results get seen and send out hard copies of the results that don&apos;t.
			I guess getting test results via mail is still sort of a form of telehealth?
			It&apos;s not a very efficient form though.
			The website would have gotten the results to me instantaneously as soon as I had time to view them, and would cost the doctors&apos; office less.
		</p>
		<div class="APA_references">
			<h3>References:</h3>
			<p>
				Ogden, J. (2017). The Psychology of Health and Illness: An Open Access Course. Retrieved from <a href="https://my.uopeople.edu/pluginfile.php/326138/mod_book/chapter/166764/Ogden-The_psychology_of_health_and_illness.pdf"><code>https://my.uopeople.edu/pluginfile.php/326138/mod_book/chapter/166764/Ogden-The_psychology_of_health_and_illness.pdf</code></a>
			</p>
			<p>
				Rixon, L., Hirani, S. P., Cartwright, M., &amp; Newman, S. P. (2017). The effect of telehealth on quality of life and psychological outcomes over a 12-month period in a diabetic cohort within the Whole Systems Demonstrator cluster randomised trial. JMIR Diabetes, 2(2), e18. Retrieved from <a href="http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/17936/"><code>http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/17936/</code></a>
			</p>
		</div>
	</blockquote>
</section>
<section id="include.d">
	<h2><code>include.d</code></h2>
	<p>
		I got sidetracked looking up information on Perl and didn&apos;t get much work on <code>include.d</code>.
		It&apos;s possible I might reimplement <code>include.d</code> in Perl and ditch the $a[PHP] version, though I don&apos;t know enough about Perl to know if that&apos;s a viable option right now.
		I have very specific base requirements for the language this main library of mine is written in.
	</p>
	<p>
		I wrote up the tests I could for <code>include.d</code>, but I need more $a[URI]-based classes in order to test some of the yet-unused portions of my $a[URI] definition helper class.
		I have six tests left to run.
		I&apos;m so close!
		I was hoping to finish today, but I guess that won&apos;t happen.
		I&apos;ll need to go through the list of $a[URI] schemes and find the ones that implement the things I need tested, then build classes to work with those $a[URI]s.
		It feels really odd building a bunch of classes that I don&apos;t plan to use any time soon just to make the tests pass.
	</p>
</section>
END
);
